Abstract Quotes

• In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.

  

  Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Love
  • Humanity
  • Abstract

• Where human eyes have never seen, where human beings have never been, I build a world of abstract dreams, and I wait for you.

  

  Sun Ra
  • World
  • Dream
  • Waiting

• The Armstrong record that I personally like the most, is a recording of a song by Harold Arlen called, "I Got a Right to Sing the Blues" . Most of Armstrong's solos tended to stick pretty close to the melody. But for some reason, it's like he let go of the tether and suddenly he's playing this beautiful high, almost abstract line that's floating above the beat. I compare it to the way that a 19th century operatic tenor might have sang an Aria because he's just completely let loose of the background and he's making this magic sort of flying above the staff.

  

  Terry Teachout
  • Song
  • Reason
  • Magic

• The average development time for a Hollywood movie is nine years. Nine years for a studio film. And a lot of what you do is abstract.

  

  Stephen Gaghan
  • Film
  • Development
  • Average

• A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exit in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross sections cut through actions, snapshots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one, things in motion, motion in things.

  

  Ernest Fenollosa
  • Action
  • Eye
  • Cutting

• There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.

  

  Nikolai Lobachevsky
  • Mathematics
  • Abstract
  • Branch

• I try to get out of a lot of things by just kind of morphing and and shifting - and that's the way I got into music in general, by being really into free music and improvised jazz music, and stuff like that.To me, the most abstract thing that you could possibly do in music is make a song that's under four minutes long. It doesn't make any sense to me.

  

  Chad VanGaalen
  • Music
  • Song
  • To Do

• True knowledge of good and evil as we possess is merely abstract or general, and the judgment which we pass on the order of things and the connection of causes, with a view to determining what is good or bad for us in the present, is rather imaginary than real.

  

  Baruch Spinoza
  • Knowledge
  • Evil
  • General

• Some physicists describe gravity in terms of ten dimensions all curled up. But those aren't real words-just placeholders, used to refer to parts of abstract equations.

  

  Scott Adams
  • Real
  • Science
  • Term

• The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

  

  George Lakoff
  • Medicine
  • Unconscious
  • Metaphorical

• Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

  

  William James
  • Truth
  • Law
  • Language

• A tendency toward the abstract is inherent in linear expression: graphic imagery being confined to outlines has a fairy-like quality and at the same time can achieve great precision.

  

  Paul Klee
  • Achieve
  • Tendency
  • Fairy

• Algebraic geometry seems to have acquired the reputation of being esoteric, exclusive, and very abstract, with adherents who are secretly plotting to take over all the rest of mathematics. In one respect this last point is accurate.

  

  David Mumford
  • Mathematics
  • Reputation
  • Accurate

• In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.

  

  Michael Behe
  • Imagine
  • Evolution
  • Complexity

• The artist must ask you to think of the world in a different way, and sometimes it's a more abstract way; sometimes it's a completely different kind of colouring.

  

  William Lipscomb
  • World
  • Artist
  • Abstract

• Art is only abstract when you look the other way.

  

  Karen Elizabeth Gordon
  • Way
  • Abstract

• A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts.

  

  Bill Gaede
  • Individual
  • Experiments
  • Mathematician

• Like Aristotle, conservatives generally accept the world as it is; they distrust the politics of abstract reason – that is, reason divorced from experience.

  

  Benjamin Wiker
  • World
  • Reason
  • Accepting

• I abstract it in my photographs: I like large planes and spaces, areas of texture and light, like deserts or oceans or monumental places.

  

  Herb Ritts
  • Light
  • Ocean
  • Desert

• Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.

  

  Gerhard Richter
  • Reality
  • Pictures
  • Abstract

• The engine room really is a metaphor for my head, and all the things bangin' around, and I think I share that with a lot of people. A lot of memories, and a lot of hopes, and a lot of just dealing with the day-to-day. Sometimes it gets all abstract.

  

  Mike Watt
  • People
  • Thinking
  • Sometimes

• The common willing of a common world is an eminently practical undertaking and not in the least abstract.

  

  Daniel Kemmis
  • World
  • Common
  • Willing

• In mysticism, knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life which becomes its living manifestation. To acquire mystical knowledge means to undergo a transformation; one could even say that the knowledge is the transformation. Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, can often stay abstract and theoretical. Thus most of today’s physicists do not seem to realize the philosophical, cultural and spiritual implications of their theories.

  

  Lois McMaster
  • Today
  • Spiritual
  • Realizing

• Wrong dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance has more attraction than abstract right.

  

  William Hazlitt
  • Pride
  • Circumstances
  • Attraction

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